Now, on the eve of the meeting, the company has announced that it has orders booked for 500 more complete genome sequences. The press release also notes that the company successfully churned out a total of 50 sequences in 2009 for more than 10 customers.

These are impressive numbers for a company whose technology and business model - a unique "genome factory" approach in which its technology is deployed only in its own custom-built facilities rather than sold to genome facilities - were regarded with profound skepticism by many researchers in the AGBT audience last year. Will the company be able to meet its stated target of 10,000 genomes (oops, I mean 5,000 genomes) this year? We'll see.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing what else the company has to say in the presentation by its CSO Rade Drmanac on Saturday.

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I've been remiss in blogging from the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting here in Marco Island, Florida, primarily due to some panic-stricken last-minute changes to the slides for my own presentation last night.
Fortunately the conference has been extremely well-covered by others:…

I wrote last week about the dramatic presentation here at AGBT by Clifford Reid, CEO of new DNA sequencing company Complete Genomics. Reid made grand promises - entire human genome sequencing for $5000 available this year, and the sequencing of a million complete human genomes within the next five…

The big news from the JP Morgan investment conference today is the announcement of a brand new shiny sequencing machine from Illumina, the HiSeq 2000. The new machine boasts an impressive set of statistics, and looks likely to gradually replace Illumina's GAIIx as the workhorse of most modern…

GenomeWeb News reports that genome sequencing company Complete Genomics is cutting costs in the lead-up to the commercial launch of its whole-genome sequencing service in June:
In order to save its remaining cash, the company recently
implemented "a variety of cost-saving measures," including "some…

Totally unrelated, but I have a question about model organisms in genetics.

Bdelloid rotifers are able to incorporate foreign DNA into their genome. Given that this happens, what is their status as potential model organisms for genetic research? What are the pros and cons of using them to study mechanisms surrounding, say, recombination, or using them as genetic engineering model organisms?

It will be a little tough to judge if they will truly get 5,000 full coverage genomes. Due to the nature of their business (selling services as opposed to instruments) there is no way to tell how many instruments they possess and what type of true scalability they have. Additionally, the sheer computing power to store and analyze 5,000 genomes in a year is mind-boggling. Approaching from just the storage angle, one would likely need somewhere from 5-30 TB (that's 5,000-30,000 GB) per genome (assuming 50X coverage) just to archive the data. Multiply that by 5,000 and one can begin to see the sheer scale needed to undertake such an ambitious project.

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